You are the U.S. Marketing and Sales General Manager with a large, international

Question

You are the U.S. Marketing and Sales General Manager with a large, international soda company. Your organization is going through a restructuring and you have just received the responsibility of overseeing a marketing team based out of South America. Most of your managerial experience has been based within the U.S. alone and you not very familiar with the culture, the employees, or customers within the South American market. Using some of the diversity management techniques discussed in Robbins and Judge (2016), explain how you would approach the new responsibility of managing your South American team.

Explanation / Answer

The new responsibility will need following actions from my side.

(a) Study of demographical and socio economic factors, cultures, customs, languages, food habits, lifestyle of the people.

(b) Study of societal structures and their norms, business ettiquettes, locals' attitude towards expatriates, communication and negotiation styles, do and don't etc.

(c) Learning basics of one or two local languages.

(d) Nurturing respect for diversity at the workplace right from the day one by encouraging interaction between people differing in race, gender, ethnicity, age and color.

(e) Encouraging open communication and promoting a culture of transparency, respect, inclusion and support irrespective of the differences between them.

(f) Resolving conflicts in nascent stages only. Discouraging beliefs based on biases.

(g) Exercising zero tolerance for violation of diversity related norms.

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